Category: history

one gig is not enough

Apple history OSX technology

Thirteen years ago I worked for the first time on a SGI computer. “Super Computer” as it’s owners liked to call it whenever they could. They spent more than you would pay for mid sized house on it’s memory alone. It had 1GB RAM. Telling people casually about this machine back in the day I had to emphasize: No, not the hard drive, the RAM is one Gigabyte. There were a handful of computers of this size in Germany back in the day.

Yesterday I saw somebody beach-ball on a MacBook. She just uses it for the normal communication things you do these days, no ‘heavy’ applications. This computer had the same memory size: one Gigabyte. And it is not enough. The machine was swapping. Horribly slow.

Something is a bit odd here: Using one gigabyte you could store one million pages of text. Or one thousand books with a thousand pages each. Or you could fill the screen of the laptop with 350 layers of images. 349 of them being invisible.

Memory is cheap these days. But wasting a whole GB is something that might
lead to the wasting a whole 16GB in a few years. That memory one could use probably for real useful things as well.

distro history

history linux technology

I am not a sysadmin. Ok, I adminstrate machine, but mostly so that I can go back and write some more horrible code. Coding for unix system is the most fun. I still remember when the Sun spark pizzabox showed up in the adjacent office and it came with a huge box of documentation: “They want you to know all this? Awesome!” On DOS PCs I was used to an environment where equipement makers would not share any knowledge.
After working on Intergraph work stations I then spent years with Irix. Which was nice at the time, since SGI had lots of money and even used some of it wisely. Of course the writing was on the wall. And running a web server on basically free hardware (except for electricity) was intruiging enough to try to deal with Linux. I am still trying to do that. Redhat was what came my way first. It worked ok, but at some point I got sick of rpm dependency stacks. Debian looked good with apt-get. So I built two boxes running that, and they drive me crazy. No chkconfig, ‘just’ use ‘sysv-rc-conf’. Once in a while I have to deal with Suse, but new machines I build with Fedora. Yum is pretty much making me happy these days. I simply don’t understand why somebody thought it would be a great idea to rename httpd to apache (or vice versa). And there are lots and lots of these differences. You don’t notice them when you stay with one system. But switching back and forth makes this annoying. Comes with the concept of free and open software I guess. But somebody I would like to have the cake and eat it too.

The quality of software is quiet interesting: the core of things seems to work really well for linux. Not so much ‘core’ as in ‘kernel’ but rather functionalities. The fringes, the configurations, the interface to adminstrate these things is pretty horrible. The babylonic /etc/init.d/ confusion is only one example. Another one would be that sar is by default off after you installed it on debian. You have to go into /etc/default/sysstat and enable it. Trickier to find than it should be.

the long last throws

history politics

eighteen Months ago the vice president predicted that the Iraq war would be over soon

What is ridicolous is that this administration is still been taken serious by some. Their track record of mis judgements is pretty stellar.

new tech

free of any reason history

nice video

BlogsNow history internet media

In four minutes this video shows how we got here

Nice. And #1 @ right now. Which is nice, since neither tailrank, nor techmeme nor nor Digg have picked this up yet. They will, eventually. Nice to see that
BlogsNow is still the best source for non maintstream items. Those other tools seemed to skewed towards
the big mainstream and established blog themes and news. BlogsNow just ‘brute forces’ it: All links count,
all blogers do. If it matters to enough real people to link to, then it will make the list. No matter what it is.

as-204

history

BlogsNow pointed out that it has been 40 years since the Apollo-1 incident.

greyfication

history linux malware marketing media


So far botnets have predominantly infected Windows-based computers, although there have been scattered reports of botnet-related attacks on computers running the Linux and Macintosh operating systems.

That’s the NY Times being clueless about Botnets. Good that they write about it. As it is a problem.
Bad that they write so badly about it. The author seems to like ot cover his bases here. “Scattered reports”? God, there are scattered reports about Ant’s playing doom in mongolia. This is as covering. Not more. The reality is that 100% of all botnets are run on Windows machines. There are still no Viruses for OS X. There are MS Office infections that affect the OS X flavor of the product. But the Operating system has been save.

It’s as binary as that. Don’t get me wrong: Apple sucks in some areas. But their OS has had no real life virus infections. People seem to shy away from such binary truths. Easier to throw in a ‘scattered reports’ here and there. Pseudo Balance. It’s actually much more harmful than it seems: It leaves loopholes. It kills the truth: Somebody with an intention could quote now the New York Times that there have been Botnets on Linux and OS X. Which is a lie. Not true. The big question that needs a real answer is, if Vista can join the club of predomiantly safe operating systems or not. Unfortunately journalists will not help in finding this out.

The only real weapon against malware is the truth.
Too bad that the New York Times is too afraid to avoid it.

predictions 2007

history

continue to go badly:

Sony, specifically PS3
Iraq, tied to it the current US administration
next gen DVD formats (HD-DVD and blu-ray)
Yahoo
Microsoft
GM, Ford and Chrysler

continue to do well:

Google
Apple
Toyota

fourty five years ago

history technology

World receiver from 1962

modern

history media

It probably is a sign of age that these days I can look at a site like arkinetia and like all I see, while pretty women are kind of a yawn lately.
Looking at these houses it seems that Modernism was not just a ‘phase’. It seems to come back, and it makes allot of sense. The iPod could have been done by Dieter Rahms. Kinda. The ideas behind modern design and architecture are still valid. For a while ‘mordern’ was also ‘hip’. People accepted it’s easthetics and repeting it’s symbols, whithout needing to get behind the underlying ideas. Of course this kind of ‘hollow reign’ never lasts.

When modernism comes back now, then I hope that it does for the reason that more people are ready for the underlying view of human life. Not because rectangular is the new black. Time will tell.